Using nanotubes, Seagate's patent involves coating the surface of a hard
drive's platter with an extremely thin layer of extremely tough lubricant. The
lubricant is designed to protect the actual magnetic medium, which in itself
ranges from 2 to 50nm in thickness. Using this lubricant, Seagate will lower
the read/write head to the point where it actually may come into contact with
the platter. Seagate will also be introducing a heating mechanism such as a
laser, which will heat up a small area of the platter allowing magnetic
particles to be arranged more precisely -- thus allowing greater data
densities. The laser itself will be positioned adjacent to the read and write
head.

Since the lubricant layer is so thin however, the area that was heated will
have some of the lubricant evaporated. To combat this, a reservoir that
contains lubricant made of hundreds of thousands to millions of nanotubes is
contained within the hard drive. Using precise pressure, the lubricant is
evaporated into a vapor, and the vapor then deposits itself onto the area where
there was depleted lubricant. According to Seagate, the vapor lubricant will
take no more than a single disc rotation to complete the filling processes. The
patent also says that hard drives will contain enough nanotube lubricant to
last anywhere from 5 to 10 years. From Seagate's patent:

The saturated reservoir 60 of disc lubricant may be placed at any suitable
location within the disc enclosure 12. The reservoir 60 delivers a
predetermined vapor pressure of lubricant inside the enclosure. Lubricant
molecules thereby enter the gas phase and bombard the disc surface with a known
rate principally determined by the vapor pressure. A multilayer surface film of
lubricant is therefore built up from the gas phase. Equilibrium is then
established between the gas phase lubricant molecules and the outermost layer
of the formed multilayer surface film.

Although it is unknown when this technology will make it to market, it's
evident that scientists are hard at work devising new ways to keep the hard
drive going. Using nanotube technology in conjunction with perpendicular
recording, we should be able to see hard drives with capacities in the
terabytes become common. Seagate suggests that we can see hard drives with 10
times the capacities of today's largest hard drives.

Fujitsu also recently announced a breakthrough in the
lubricant layer of its hard drives.By
using an extra thin layer of hard, friction-reduced materials, the magnetic
head can get closer to the drive platter.Thus,the bits can be smaller and
the density of the platter increased.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

KY Brand announces an investigation into the legitmacy of Seagate's lubrication "innovation", reportedly considering a patent-infrigement case against the hard drive manufacturer. Rod Johnson from KY Brand issued a statement: "We've always been about protecting our brand from potential infringement, and with such a huge company in a market like 'Hard Drives', this is especially close to our own market. We are pursuing legal action against Seagate unless they are planning on licensing our technology for use in their products."

Seagate has not issued an official statement regarding Rod's comments.

indeed, i agree. HDD's are probably the second slowest component people replace (Monitors probably is first), people quite often keep HDD's for more then 5 years, so this is little scary that you have a predetirmined date in there, when the nano-tube lubrication runs out and you lose all of your data.

If they are gonna do this, i hope this put some kind of sensor in the HDD to give the current lubrication levels in the HDD (like ink-cartridges) and the software to check it.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates